A Cure for Wellness
Director: Gore Verbinski
Stars: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
Duration: 156 mins
Class: 18
KRS Releasing Ltd
A man is sitting at his desk, working late at night at a Wall Street stockbroking firm. He grimaces in pain and clutches his chest. He struggles to get up for a glass of water… only to collapse and die at the water cooler.
So, hard work is bad for you. This is clearly what the firm’s CEO Roland Pembroke (Harry Groener) thought too. He has just upped and left the company to spend time in an alpine medical spa and has just declared, via a rather odd letter to the board of directors, that he won’t be back. The board won’t have any of it; they are about to conclude a merger and need Pembroke to sign off on it.
So they send young broker Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) to bring him back. Not long after his arrival at the spa, however, Lockhart is involved in an ‘accident’ and ends up a patient there himself. However, he soon realises that things are not quite as tranquil as they seem. Pembroke’s behaviour is rather bizarre and the patients are not getting better, despite the ‘miracle cure’ being touted by the spa’s director Dr Volmer (Jason Issacs).
I admit I often accuse a film of being all style, no substance, but it is certainly true here. A Cure for Wellness has plenty going for it. There is the tranquil, breathtaking ancient castle-on-a-mountainside setting and its depressing interior. The latter is reminiscent of a very old hospital with its stark neon lights, depressing green tiles, obsolete equipment, dank underground rooms that house large tanks with floating bodies, and medical staff whose demeanour is as starched as their uniforms. However, the evocative visuals and chilling atmosphere cannot disguise the fact that this is an overlong, overwrought and over-vague excuse for a psychological thriller.
The evocative visuals and chilling atmosphere cannot disguise the fact that this is an overlong excuse for a psychological thriller
Although you get the sense that director Gore Verbinksi and screenwriter Justin Haythe are at pains to comment on the fast lives we lead, and our perennial obsession with living long and healthy lives and so on, too much is thrown in to the pot.
There is the mystery cure, made from the allegedly healing properties of the water surrounding the spa. An array of eels make constant appearances, and much is made of the legend that shrouds the spa involving a baron who, 200 years earlier, married his sister who was bearing his child, only for her to be burnt at the stake on the site where the spa now stands.
Lockhart constantly flashes back to his childhood and the death of his father, and all these plot stands and countless red herrings are thrown at the audience, reaching the point when plot ties itself up in too many knots to unravel satisfactorily, or with any sense.
There are maybe two genuinely frightening moments throughout, one involving dentistry. But there is much in there purely for shock value, as can be attested by the scenes featuring poor Hannah (Mia Goth), a young patient whom Lockhart befriends.
On the surface, it appears she is integral to the storyline, but as she poses seductively in a bath full of eels, or bleeds in a swimming pool in some utterly unsubtle menstrual imagery (while eventually being subjected to much worse) it feels like little more than exploitation.
The young actress gamely pulls off the role of the haunting and haunted young woman, while DeHaan does all he can with the little characterisation he is given. Jason Isaacs, who commanded a mastery of evil in the Harry Potter films, dials it in here, all sneers and panto villainy as Dr Volmer. We are treated to some solid characterisation from Celia Imrie as the seemingly demented but really rather astute patient Mrs Watkins.
The film is evocative of director Martin Scorsese’s infinitely superior Shutter Island, not only in their similar plotlines – a man searches for the truth in an eerie medical facility – but also in DeHaan’s striking resemblance to that film’s protagonist Leonardo di Caprio. Yet, the comparisons end there, for any lofty psychological heights A Cure For Wellness tries to reach very quickly crash into the depths of psycho-babble, resulting in a film whose whole falls way short than the sum of its parts, to the point that by the end of its 146-minute running time, what you may need is a cure for tedium.